Projection/Forecast Capabilities with Current Asset Account

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Richard Thomas <richdthomas at gmail.com>wrote:

> The way I use my Current Asset Account (CAA), is that all transactions get
> entered within a day or so of them happening.
>
> So when I use my debit card, I enter the information about that transaction
> into the CAA and leave the transaction status as "n", for not cleared.
>
> I have also set up Scheduled Transactions, which mostly contains monthly
> outgoings that are taken by direct debit, E.G. mortgage, electric, etc.
>
> What I would like to be able to do is see how much money I have left to
> spend until pay day.
>
> To me, the amount I have to spend, is the amount that shows in the CAA as
> "Present" and then subtracted from that amount are all the Scheduled
> Transactions that are due to occur up until pay day (my Scheduled
> Transactions are only debit, so that's why my example only talks about
> subtracting, but adding would come into play if any Scheduled Transactions
> are credit).
>
> I'm not sure if this is something that can be done at the moment.  There
> are two ways I can think that might achieve this.
>
> 1) That GnuCash has a projection/forecast capability, where it bases the
> projection on the "Present" balance and the forthcoming Scheduled
> Transactions, which would constitute the "Projection" balance.  This will
> be less than the "Present" balance and is the balance I want to know.
>
> 2) That GnuCash performs it's "Since Last Run..." processing, such that the
> Scheduled Transactions are placed into my CAA ahead of the date that they
> are due to be scheduled, but the schedule date is preserved and used as the
> transaction date in the CAA.
>
> I hope my explanation makes sense.
>
> Does anyone know if this is currently possible with GnuCash?
>


I may be a little confused by the CAA description -- are you saying that
you enter ALL your transactions into one GnuCash account, rather than
having a separate asset account for your bank account, or are you just
simplifying things? I personally have more than one type of bank account,
one I use for savings and another for daily transactions, for example, so
both of those are current assets, HOWEVER they are both current assets, so
various reports can easily aggregate them together automatically.

As for the "scheduled" transactions -- if you are certain they will be
debited or credited in advance, then go ahead and enter them in advance on
the date they will occur. Then you can instantly tell in the register what
your balance is as you are entering them. The transactions with a future
date appear in the register all the time, but if I recall there's a heavy
blue line separating the current and past from the future transactions.

If this is not possible, is it something that can be achieved with a Python
> script or Custom report?
>
> If no to all of that, then what would the feasibility be of having GnuCash
> enhanced so that this can be done?
>

If I understand what you are asking I think no changes to GnuCash are
necessary, just an adjustment to your operating procedure. You can apply
scheduled transactions AND non-scheduled transactions in advance, and they
will show correctly in the register.

When you run reports, they will only show the transactions that fall within
the date range that you specify.



> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Richard.
>

I hope my comments are helpful.

         --Tommy Trussell


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